Visual display devices are ubiquitous in battery-powered portable electronic devices such as notebook computers and mobile, hand-held telephones where, typically, they are the largest consumers of battery power. For example, in mobile devices equipped with thin-film transistor (TFT) liquid-crystal displays (LCD) utilizing backlight illumination, the LCD panel consumes more than 30% of the device power and the backlight typically consumes 75% of the LCD power. Thus, for conserving battery power, there is primary interest in minimizing the power consumption of the display device.
An LCD screen typically includes an array of liquid-crystal pixels arranged as a plurality of rows each having a plurality of pixels, arranged in columns, with each pixel capable of displaying any one of 256 luminance values of a gray scale and the corresponding chrominance values. Each pixel has its own liquid crystal cell, a dedicated thin-film transistor, and a dedicated capacitor. The electrical field of the capacitor controls the orientation of the liquid crystals within the cell, determining the optical transmissivity of the cell and thus its luminance when lit by a backlight. The capacitor is charged and discharged via its transistor. Device activation typically is row-by-row, so that, at any one time, all column lines are connected to a single row.
For saving power in an LCD device, dynamic backlight control can be used, involving dynamic scaling down and up of the backlight brightness while the device is being used, e.g. in playing back a movie. Moreover, it is beneficial to correspondingly transform an image/pattern to be displayed by transforming the pixel luminance values.